The morning sun had risen, and the land lay bright beneath it.
Amid that brightness, the strange, dazzling Dazzling Splendor inside the formation on the rock looked utterly out of place.
Inside the formation, "His Holiness" Clifton was drenched in sweat. Even his white robe was nearly soaked through. He kept glancing around anxiously, his face a picture of panic.
The Ascension Ritual should not have lasted this long!
In his experience, the Ascension Ritual should have begun the instant the morning sun rose and ended the instant its crimson disk cleared the horizon. From start to finish, it should have taken about two minutes.
But more than twenty minutes had passed. The sun was fully up, yet the ritual was still underway.
The "spirits" extracted from the treasures and sacrifices had long since merged with Natalia under the formation's power. Strangely, an ascendant should have woken soon afterward, absorbed those spirits, completed the transformation, and raised their life tier. Natalia had done none of that. She remained fused with the spirits, with no sign of waking.
At the end of the formation, there was still only a dense, dazzling Dazzling Splendor that spun without cease. Not even the faintest trace of a human shape could be seen within it.
Clifton had never seen anything like this, but he could have figured it out with his nose: this was very bad!
Was it a good thing for someone's body to dissolve into a great mass of spirits?
Of course not!
Practitioners of the Invisible Arts did not care whether they retained human form. Their ultimate goal was to become something inhuman. But until their cultivation reached a certain point, they still needed a body to contain their spirit and allow them to survive in the mortal world.
As things stood,